There goes that startup idea

[xela]

Throughout the bubble I kept coming up with startup ideas that I would happily tell anyone, because IMO they were too stupid for anyone to fund. In several cases, someone else came up with one of those same ideas, and either because they didn't realize it was stupid or didn;' care, did manage to get it funded — only to have their company crash and burn, verifying my original opinion of the idea.

But throughout that period, and ever since, there was one idea I kept fairly close: The one that I thought had genuine potential. What always struck me as odd was that while what I considered fairly inane and obscure ideas were being imagined and productized by other people, this one, which I considered both the most sensible and the most obvious of my ideas, was nowhere to be seen.

Until now.

(They don't have what I consider an essential feature, omnidirectional video, nor a second I consider pretty important, a reasonable tamperproofing system. But I find it hard to imagine ethat those aren't totally obvious at this point. If in fact I'm giving something away by suggesting them at this point, I deserve poverty.)

Comments

[baronessv.livejournal.com]

This is totally random, but it's a slow work day so I've been cruising around friends-of-friends pages.

Your thing about the Last Exit freaked me the hell out. I've tried to explain that exact same thing to people more times than I can imagine.

I doubt we ever split a pot of coffee (I didn't drink it back then, it was mochas or nothing), but I wouldn't be surprised if we'd rubbed elbows at one of the marble bathroom-stall-divider tables at some point.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Oh, Last Exit mochas. Back in the day, I took many a long late-night walk fueled by one of those.

I don't know of anyplace in town that will sell us a half-litre aluminum pot of coffee, but would you like to get together for cup sometime?

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

I believe the theory that there is actually very little value in an "original" idea these days. That is, I don't think it makes sense to keep good ideas secret, because (1) most if not all ideas occur to a lot of people at the same time (2) any given person who is thinking will usually have about 100X more high quality ideas than they have time to pursue (3) ideas get better when they are tossed around between people. While some folks are still much more excited to bring an idea to life if they feel like they thought of it themselves, I am more and more convinced that the valuable thing is the persistence and creativity necessary to mature an idea, not to think of it in the first place.

[jered]

In fact, there's a common saying among VCs that if nobody else has your idea too, it probably isn't very good. (VCs are frequently loudmouthed assholes, but there is some degree of truth in this.) What matters in most case is execution of product development and sales strategy.

I have to wonder what the market is like for this. The thing that would get the aspect you talk about to take off would be if insurance companies subsidized it, but I'm not sure they have a motivation to do so. Many states are "no fault" to begin with, to reduce paperwork and overhead.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I thought the obvious initial market would be police fleets, followed by other commercial fleets. But mass market potential would IMO have to be rooted in an indirect subsidy by the insurance industry (only about a quarter of states are no-fault, down from about half ~25 years ago). To the extent that I thought about marketing it at all, I thought it might be possible to convince insurers to offer discounts to drivers who had them installed, perhaps by including a phone-home panic feature, thus making it also an anti-theft device.